Wirtz: This dust-up has farmers perplexed, concerned

Published 8:00 pm, Thursday, March 12, 2009

One would think that former President George W. Bush would have a little more common sense about how the wind blows, being from a rural part of Texas.

But his administration's Environmental Protection Agency in 2006 proposed regulatory standards for airborne soot and dust that have farmers a bit perplexed, and even more concerned about whether people living inside the Beltway have gone bonkers.

One aspect of the rule attempts to regulate everything that a farmer does, from spreading combine dust to making feedlot dust, and a lot of dust in between, including road dust.

Understandably, the EPA wants to regulate rural dust because a lot of that dust might contain parts per million or billion of pesticides and herbicides, or in the case of mining dust that is covered under the same set of regulations, minute amounts of toxic metals.

So starts the corundrum. The farmers, who labor intensely in dust, are caught up in standards - which mean rules that cost everyone a lot of money for what benefit no one knows at this time - that are mandated under the decades-old Clean Air Act. Yet, there is little about dust they can control. It is, as Peter, Paul and Mary are wont to say, "blowin' in the wind."

And it's not as if farmers make the dust. The dust is there. They just work in it.

The farmers' lobbyists, including the American Farm Bureau Federation, sued the EPA in district court in Washington, D. C., to try to become exempt from the rule. But that court, in a stretch of logic only someone living inside the Beltway can appreciate, said they couldn't differentiate between dust caused by the wind blowing across a farmers' field from soot caused by a coal-fired power plant and emitted through a smokestack.

Even that court, however, said that the EPA lacked the scientific support that showed that dust caused by the blowing of soil and sand is as harmful as, say, those put out through the tailpipes of automobiles.

Still, the court said, that that didn't matter. Dust is dust and if it's our dust - even if God made the dust - it needs to be regulated.

So regulated it shall be. From dust we arose and to dust we will return. But only with EPA approval.